About a week ago, I mentioned that if someone does web searches on me, they don't lead back here. On interviews, I've never been asked to justify or explain anything that I've written here. In fact, the topic of fraudulent traffic never comes up unless I bring it up. I was asked about a paper I'd coauthored while I worked at UCLA on a PayPal interview; the interviewer saw it in CiteSeer. AFAIK, that's the only time someone's brought up something at an interview based on something they saw about me on the web.

Searching for me under my real name will bring up a fair amount of Usenet posts, however. If for some reason, I'm being passed over based on what I've written on Usenet, there's nothing I can do about it now. A lot of it was written back in the 1980s and 1990s – long before search engines existed in the form they do today. The three major concerns I had (that I can remember) were feeling rejected about not having (or losing) an SO (significant other), anxiety about grad school, and anxiety about possibly switching careers to music. Later on, I wrote a lot about broadcasting, particularly about the radio formats I knew a lot about. If anything, these posts should cast me in a positive light, especially since I drew upon my knowledge of broadcast advertising to make my arguments about how certain aspects of it did not apply to Internet advertising.

Anyway, the long and short of it is that if someone's holding my old Usenet posts against me, there's nothing I can do about it now.

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Don't see how writing about those subjects on Usenet years ago would work against you. My understanding is that employers are looking for signs of poor judgment or character, e.g., libel of former employers, obscene photos or scary political writings.